Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Eccentricity: A Note On Yesterday’s Photo

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that it was the third month in a row that I grabbed a photo of the young Moon, although the photo I took Sunday started with me being interested in the outline of a tall tree.

In June when I took the photo from “People Born Illuminated” a car full of young women slowed down and the girls yelled, “Cheese!”

Sunday when I was taking the photo for “Almost Like The Mast Of A Sailboat” a middle-age woman stopped her pickup truck alongside me and watched me taking the picture. She smiled and said, “Didn’t God send you a beautiful picture? It’s nice of you to appreciate His work.” (I just kind of smiled and made polite small-talk and she chatted for a bit and then drove off.)

I don’t know that this means anything, but it seems to me that a person standing around taking a picture has become such an odd thing that people feel a little imperative to comment on it. The act of picture taking has been reduced to being considered normal and acceptable in situations like taking pictures at parties or for special occasions. But people taking pictures just for the sake of taking pictures doesn’t seem to be all that common any more.

I didn’t consciously, explicitly notice this until the woman stopped her pickup truck Sunday. But I think I noticed this at some visceral level in some unconscious way a while ago and that is why I felt so uneasy about trying to take a photograph of that praying mantis in the parking lot that I decided not to do it. (And thinking back, I may have started noticing this years ago when I stopping wearing my orange hat: My Orange Hat In Theory And Practice)

Being eccentric used to be something about trying to have fun and something about trying to be creative. Now being eccentric seems to be the mark of unpleasant lunatics and disgusting bums and posturing bores.

This makes me uneasy because after half-a-century of effort I seem to have gotten a little relaxed trying to be eccentric and that means the best I can hope for in the modern world is to be a posturing bore.